Almost spring break!

Did our laundry at the University on Friday- gotta love colleges, everything is cheaper there. DuPuy met with some of us for meetings and everyone else wandered around the campus and played a bit of soccer. After we were let loose in Bath- I went to our new favorite cafe, Jika Jika, to read and chill for a bit then walked around and sketched until we met to watch The Hurt Locker. What an amazing movie! I highly recommend it- war is a drug (?) interesting topic...we walked around and had some dinner then went to a pub before we had to meet up with DuPuy to drive back to the hostel.

The next day we left for Salisbury and stopped at ___ to look at a suspension bridge. The engineers in us were all geeked out. Driving away from it was crazy because it literally looked like it was just resting on the two cliffs- like you dropped a ladder across them and could drive over it. Technology is freaky sometimes.

Next stop was Castle Drogo- the roads getting there were giving me a heart attack. It was a 1.5 lane road basically with tons of turns so at any moment you could turn the corner and ram into another car. Luckily we made it out without a scratch. The house was amazing though- from the outside, not so much, but the inside made up for it. The design that went into every space and entrance and light switch was phenomenal. Lutyens knew what he was doing.

Last stop was Poundbury. It was an application of Leon Kreer's ideology on urbanism- he was working with Prince Charles to commission it. The urbanism I can appreciate, but the architecture and design of some of the buildings were sub par. It was all too similar and all of the buildings had to subscribe to a particular style- it could have used some variation. There were a lot of great episodes within it, but as a whole I didn't like it too much. Before leaving DuPuy got the energy out of us by taking us to an old Roman earthenwork we ran up and climbed all around. Good times.

It feels good to be back in London. After being on the road for a few weeks its nice to be back in a familiar place. We walked around a new section of London we hadn't been in before (up around Hyde and Regents Park and Oxford Circus). There is some extremely expensive shopping around there! Liberty scarves- the cheapest I saw was 110 pounds! Good thing I don't have my debit card yet...Is going to be a hectic night- leaving for Spring Break tomorrow so we need to get everything in order before the morning. We are going to have a lot of flights to get to over break so hopefully we can get all the local transportation to the airports figured out! I'm excited to be traveling around Europe without a chaperone- I have always been with a teacher or my family! Exciting but scary....hopefully it ends well :P